Regardless of how your brain cortex makes you think about another person that looks different, there is a natural process ongoing in the most primitive areas of our brain. Our reptilian brain has a lot of trouble when it is needed to categorize something new and most of the time that brain is working only on one thing: To keep us alive.
Even though we try to rationalize our behavior some of the most important tasks We do, We do in a not conscious fashion.
Everyone who believes in the existence of alien intelligent life dreams about that first encounter but let me tell you something if that happens you are definitely going to be afraid at least in one part of your brain… deep inside.
Globalization and particularly the income gap between countries put us today in a position where we share our cities with lots of immigrants. Most of the times, that process begins with lots of discrimination and prejudgement but if you watch closely, no one seems to care about immigrants if they come from a developed country or if are considered physically attractive, in fact, people in Latin America react pretty good in those cases. Right now I live in Chile, and there is a song here that goes like this
“verás como quieren en Chile al amigo cuando es forastero” which means something like “You’ll see how we love a friend when the friend is a foreigner”
I would say that applies not to all foreigners but only to those from developed countries.
People discriminate (in a bad way) when They feel a threat in their most primitive brain, a threat to our primitive needs (thieves, rapists, drug dealers who can hurt our children, etc).
I have a friend, whose mother is African but he is not black.
Every Time someone makes a racist joke or comment he stands and says
“Hey!, watch out!, my mom is African”.
At first, people laugh, because they believe he’s joking but he keeps it very serious. After that people start to say they’re sorry, that they didn’t mean to be rude until he says
“I was joking, I don’t give a fuck about it“ and everyone laughs again.
Discrimination ends where the fear of the unknown and the prejudgement ends but I think that’s an obsolete speech. As a civilization, we’ve been working and learning on the racial issue over time but we’ve been very slow.
I rather prefer to think that eventually, the miscegenation will be the key to the elimination of forms of all racial discrimination.
Our descendants will look very different from us in the future, in fact, if we evaluate that statement at the limit (from a mathematical point of view) most people will look alike thanks to the effect of the miscegenation.
What our rational brain has not been able to achieve over time will be irrelevant when we are no longer capable of distinguishing the observable differences between races. I think this applies not only to race discrimination but also religion.
It looks like we need a big orgy to finally solve this problem. I’m not an expert in biology but It would be great to know scientifically when that could happen considering immigration patterns and prediction models so we can estimate how much time we have to fight against discrimination before the Great Orgy shows its undeniable results.
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